Johannes Hegetschweiler

Johannes Hegetschweiler (1789 to 1839) was a Swiss country doctor, botanist and statesman of the canton of Zürich. The son of a skilled village physician from a family of doctors, he studied at the medical and surgical institute in Zürich and at Tübingen from 1809 to 1812, served as chief physician in the military hospital at Rheinau during a typhus outbreak from the end of 1813, and in 1814 settled at Stäfa on Lake Zürich, where he became a busy and highly respected practitioner. He exchanged letters on botany with Paul Usteri, entered the new cantonal government in 1831, and later served as president of the health council, helped draw up the new medical organisation of the canton, took part in founding the university and directed the laying out of the botanical garden. He was shot in the night of 5 to 6 September 1839 while trying to calm an armed crowd in the Zürich unrest; the biography gives 9 September 1839 as his date of death..